Xbox Originals and Game Pass could come to PC

Depending on how you are as a gamer, Microsoft’s announcement that it’ll be bringing backwards compatibility for the original Xbox to the Xbox One either excited you, left you ambivalent or did nothing for you whatsoever. It’s an interesting move that makes it so that the Xbox One will be capable of playing three generations of Xbox Games. Whether or not that excited you, you have to admit that it’s awfully consumer friendly.

To my mind, there’s only one original Xbox game worth playing that isn’t available on PC already, and that’s Ninja Gaiden Black, but I’m sure some ardent Xbox fans will be happy to tell me how wrong I am. While I personally don’t care much for backwards compatibility because I’m not fond of replaying games, I think the feature is great for bringing in new audiences. And that would be especially applicable on PC. Being able to play OG Xbox Games on PC would let Pc gamers play other games that can’t be found anywhere else. And it could happen.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer said that he wanted to bring not only Xbox Originals, but also Game Pass to PC.

“I want people to be able to play games!” he said. “[Emulation] is hard. [Xbox] 360 specifically is a PowerPC chip, emulated to x86, which is difficult. It’s a little bit easier when you have a fixed spec, when you think about Xbox, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. And you think of the variable specs of the PC space, so you’re taking a fixed-spec PowerPC emulator and then moving it over to run on PC, so there’s a lot of work there.

“The original Xbox, OG Xbox, is a little bit easier, because that was an x86 chip it was running on. Obviously when we think about UWP and the ability for games to run across console and PC, we’re getting closer. I want developers to be able to build portable applications, which is why we’ve been focusing on UWP for games and even apps that want to run on multiple devices.

“So I think we’ve got work to go do there, but I think it’s in our future.”

As for GamePass, the company’s new subscription service that lets gamers download and play form a library of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games?

“I’ve said I want to bring Game Pass to the PC. The team doesn’t love it when I pre-announce things, but I definitely want to bring Game Pass to PC,” Spencer told PC Gamer. Presumably, it’d feature PC games and not Xbox 360 ones – but it’s nice to dream.